RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)


  • Hobbes’s State: “Why Are You Hitting Yourself?”

    Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
    by Joshua Mawhorter

    “As kids we may remember the old trope — often seen on TV or in movies — where a stronger kid would overpower a weaker kid and use the weaker kid’s hands and arms to hit him, asking mockingly, ‘Why are you hitting yourself?’ Most adults would recognize this as illegitimate for obvious reasons: though the weaker kid’s hands are literally hitting him, he is obviously being coerced against his will, such that the stronger kid is the aggressor. While most adults would pride themselves on the ability to distinguish between external coercion and self-inflicted punishment, they often fail this when it comes to the state. In fact, this is the very core of Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory — since the state represents the people by social contract, whatever the state does to an individual, that individual has consensually done it to himself.” (05/08/26)

    https://mises.org/mises-wire/hobbess-state-why-are-you-hitting-yourself

  • Ted Turner: 24 Hours That Changed The News World

    Source: Garrison Center
    by Thomas L Knapp

    “Since CNN’s launch, ‘the news’ has gone from short daily feeds covering pre-deadline events to 24/7/365 real-time coverage of far more things, in far more detail, by numerous and varied outlets. In theory, that should make the public much better informed than we used to be. We can know more OF what’s happened, and know more ABOUT what’s happened. In reality, I’m not sure our attention to important facts about important events has really increased. The 24-hour news environment seems far richer in sensationalism, pearl-clutching, and outrage bait than in useful information about the important stuff.” (05/09/26)

    https://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/20610

  • Right-Wing Influencers Don’t Understand What Makes America Great

    Source: Reason
    by Stephanie Slade

    “The Dissident Right is furious with Neil Gorsuch for saying America is a creedal nation. That just goes to show how out of touch its obsessions are.” (05/09/26)

    https://reason.com/2026/05/09/right-wing-influencers-dont-understand-what-makes-america-great/

  • Iran war marks the end of American primacy as we know it

    Source: Responsible Statecraft
    by Trita Parsi

    “The war in Ukraine shattered a core assumption about great-power dominance: that size and military strength are enough to impose one’s will. Ukraine showed otherwise. With the right strategy, geography, and resolve, a weaker state can survive and blunt — and in key respects even defeat — a much stronger adversary. The United States now faces an uncomfortable parallel. The war with Iran is exposing similar limits to American power. For decades, U.S. grand strategy has rested on primacy — the belief that America’s unmatched military capabilities enabled it to uphold global stability and shape outcomes across regions. After the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans have reached a stark conclusion: the cost of primacy is no longer sustainable — and no longer serves U.S. interests.” (05/08/26)

    https://responsiblestatecraft.org/war-with-iran/

  • Why the Scarcity of News about Our Increasing Abundance?

    Source: Free Association
    by Sheldon Richman

    “If today, compared to the past, you need to work only half the time to earn the money for a television, in effect, you’ve acquired half of the television for free! (Actually, you’ve done better than that because it will be a better television.) And you have the time to acquire other things or enjoy leisure. This is more or less true for everyone whose society is amenable to freedom of enterprise, the division of labor, and world trade.” (05/08/26)

    https://sheldonrichman.substack.com/p/tgif-abundance-keeps-increasing

  • New York Times announces the end of the climate change hoax

    Source: Fox News
    by David Marcus

    “For almost the entirety of the half century I have lived on Earth, I have had experts, teachers, politicians and activists hectoring me about how climate change is going to destroy the planet. But this week, in The New York Times, of all places, is evidence that climate alarmism is finally cooling down.’Democrats Do Not Have To Campaign On Climate Change Anymore,’ blared the headline, this week, as author Matt Huber argues that voters are rather turned off by the subject. I would like to suggest that this is because it is the single most expensive lie in human history.” [editor’s note: I’d say the single most expensive lie in history is “the state is necessary” – TLK] (05/10/26)

    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/david-marcus-new-york-times-announces-end-climate-change-hoax

  • Creators and Destroyers of Worlds

    Source: Quillette
    by Ian Nieves

    “Despite the dangers, we must seize the gifts bequeathed by existential dangers, since these amount to life in unprecedented abundance.” (05/09/26)

    https://quillette.com/2026/05/09/creators-and-destroyers-of-worlds-ai-alignment-nuclear-war/

  • No, Russia Isn’t Finished

    Source: The American Conservative
    by Leonid Ragozin

    “If you were exclusively on a mainstream Western media diet in recent weeks, you’d be excused for thinking that the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime now lies on its deathbed. Signs of ‘public discontent’ are all over the place, you see. Silicon-lipped beauty blogger Viktoria Bonya attacked the government on YouTube. So did the notorious Kremlin propagandist Ilya Remeslo, fresh from a stint at a psychiatric ward. Meanwhile, the former defense minister Sergey Shoygu might be plotting a coup, according to CNN. But if you talk to people inside Russia, as this author does on a daily basis, you’ll find them perplexed and doubting the West’s sanity upon hearing about this fresh bout of ‘Russia is finished’ sentiments.” (05/09/26)

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/no-russia-isnt-finished/

  • Meat Industry Price Fixer Sentenced to Make Money

    Source: The American Prospect
    by David Dayen

    “Three years ago, the Biden Justice Department’s antitrust division sued a company called Agri Stats that should have made us all wonder what capitalism even means anymore. After all, is it a capitalist system when one company can get every participant in a market to give them proprietary information about inventory, production costs, pricing, and profit margins, allowing those participants to know exactly what their competitors are doing, enabling them to restrict supply or raise prices without consequences? The initial lawsuit against Agri Stats, which dealt in data for broiler chicken, turkey, and pork processors, described a collusion machine, complete with clip art of little stick figures pulling profits upward.” (05/08/26)

    https://prospect.org/2026/05/08/meat-industry-agri-stats-department-of-justice-price-fix-trump/

  • Nick Bostrom Has a Plan for Humanity’s “Big Retirement”

    Source: Wired
    by Steven Levy

    “Philosopher Nick Bostrom recently posted a paper, where he postulated that a small chance of AI annihilating all humans might be worth the risk, because advanced AI might relieve humanity of ‘its universal death sentence.’ That upbeat gamble is quite a leap from his previous dark musings on AI, which made him a doomer godfather. … His more recent book, Deep Utopia, reflects a shift in his focus. Bostrom, who leads Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, dwells on the ‘solved world’ that comes if we get AI right.” (05/08/26)

    https://archive.is/vPchv

  • Non-profit group has twisted the meaning of “genocide” (and hijacked a Zionist hero’s name) to suit its own woke purposes

    Source: New York Post
    by Bethany Mandel

    “Few figures loom larger in the moral and legal history of the 20th century than Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the word ‘genocide’ after losing nearly his entire family in the Holocaust. Lemkin witnessed the epitome of evil, and then gave the world the language to describe it. The word ‘genocide’ exists because he understood that what had been done to the Jewish people was so unprecedented that existing legal vocabulary could not define it properly. He spent the rest of his life ensuring that the world would never again lack the words — or the legal framework — to confront such crimes. That is precisely why what is happening now is so grotesque. The family of Raphael Lemkin is taking legal action against the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has hijacked his name and repurposed it for its own warped woke agenda.” (05/10/26)

    https://nypost.com/2026/05/10/opinion/group-hijacked-a-zionist-heros-name-to-suit-its-woke-purposes/

  • Britain Is Pricing Its Factories into Oblivion

    Source: Foundation for Economic Education
    by Ted Newson

    “At its peak, Britain was known as the workshop of the world. Sheffield produced high-quality steel, Manchester still had a strong textiles sector and the West Midlands was world-renowned for its cars. Glasgow, Sunderland and Newcastle were shipbuilding hubs, Stoke-on-Trent produced ceramics. … In the pursuit of lowering carbon emissions, Britain has abandoned its manufacturing sector. As we have artificially inflated energy prices through policy costs and made employing people harder, our industries have shifted to countries with more business-friendly environments. While rising comparative wage rates naturally encourage industry to shift overseas, the British government has further pushed industry away through deliberate choices. This has created job losses and regional decline as former manufacturing towns lose historic businesses.” (05/08/26)

    https://fee.org/articles/britain-is-pricing-its-factories-into-oblivion/

  • Guatemala’s step toward good governance

    Source: Christian Science Monitor
    by staff

    “Just over halfway into the term of Guatemala’s reformist leader, the ‘democratic spring’ that he and his Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) sought to nurture is sending up fresh shoots of hope for lawful governance. President Bernardo Arévalo has appointed a new attorney general, marking what he calls ‘a new chapter’ for the small Central American nation. The outgoing attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, had tried to derail Mr. Arévalo’s 2024 inauguration, and has since obstructed multiple efforts to promote judicial impartiality and transparency. To many Guatemalans, Ms. Porras’ tenure symbolized entrenched political impunity and corruption that used the power of the state to settle scores with perceived enemies and make allowances for allies. In 2022, the United States cited her for repeatedly undermining anti-corruption efforts to ‘gain undue political favor.'” (05/08/26)

    https://www.csmonitor.com/Editorials/the-monitors-view/2026/0508/Guatemala-s-step-toward-good-governance

  • A Tale of Two Waiting Periods

    Source: Independent Institute
    by Stephen P Halbrook

    “The First and Tenth Circuits conflict on whether ‘cooling-off’ periods violate the text of the Second Amendment.” (05/08/26)

    https://www.independent.org/article/2026/05/08/a-tale-of-two-waiting-periods/

  • The Big Apple’s Rotten Budget Move: Raiding Pensions for Short-Term Spending

    Source: The Daily Economy
    by Thomas Savidge

    “Delaying pension contributions may ease immediate pressure on New York City’s budget, but the shell game reveals deeper weaknesses in the city’s finances.” (05/08/26)

    https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-big-apples-rotten-budget-move-raiding-pensions-for-short-term-spending/

  • What UCLA doesn’t want you to know

    Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
    by Jessie Appleby

    “The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency. When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong. And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis. That’s just what happened at UCLA this past month.” (05/08/26)

    https://www.fire.org/news/what-ucla-doesnt-want-you-know